Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Window on Eurasia: A ‘Hybrid Islam’ is Emerging in Russia, Malashenko Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, October 29 – “Traditional”
Islam in Russia is losing ground to its ‘non-traditional” competitor,
especially among the young, but the division between the two is not insuperable
and the future of Islam in the Russian Federation is likely to be “a hybrid”
combining elements of each, according to Aleksey Malashenko.

In an extensive article in “Nezavsimaya
gazeta” today, the Moscow specialist on Islam says that while the events in the
Muslim world have had an impact on Russia’s Muslims, developments within the
Muslim community inside the country, although they have attracted less
attention, have been far more important (ng.ru/ideas/2014-10-29/9_ideas.html).

On the one hand, Malashenko says,
there has been a continuation of the trends which developed in the early 1990s,
“the continuation of ‘the Islamization’ of the Islamic community” which had
been subject to Soviet atheism. And on the other, there have been certain new
developments reflecting social and political changes over the last two decades.

Muslims remained Muslim in Soviet
times far more than Orthodox Christians remained Orthodox, but they still had
to recover, Malashenko says; and the process has proven to be “a more
complicated and contradictory phenomenon because Islam in Russia has at a
minimum two mutually opposed versions, the traditional and the non-traditional.”

The first of these is rooted in the
local ethno-cultural tradition and is based on the Hanafi of Shafi schools of
Sunni Islam or on Sufism (muridism), the Moscow scholar says. The second, “non-traditional”
Islam, in contrast, is sometimes called “Arab” or Salafi Islam “does not
recognize local cultural roots.”

These two trends are competing for
members. The larger part of the Muslim community in Russia is traditional, but
increasingly young people are turning to non-traditional Islam because it “attempts
to provide answers to sharp social and political questions which are agitating
Muslims” now.

That has put the traditionalists in
a difficult situation: “they must make traditional Islam more attractive
especially for the younger generation” by providing the kind of social and
political commentaries that they have generally avoided.“This process is already taking place
although the traditionalists do not publicly acknowledge that fact.”

That is notespecially surprising let
alone “negative” or “criminal,” Malashenko says. Instead, it parallels what is
happening in Orthodox Christianity where the Russian Orthodox Church is “politicizing
Orthodoxy” as part of its outreach efforts.

Moreover, “despite the competition
between the traditionalists and the Salafis, they have a basis for dialogue.
Both support Islamization, with the major difference that the traditionalists
believe this can happen within the borders of the Russian Federation, while the
radicals think that an Islamic state must ignore national borders.

This difference often leads to
unexpected divides: Traditional Tatar Muslims want to have their prayers in
Tatar while the radicals as “internationalists” prefer to have them in Russian.
“What is more useful for the Russian state – moderate Tatar ‘nationalism’ or
recognition by the Salafis of the importance of the Russian language?”

To be sure, Malashenko says, there
is “an extremist wing in Salafism” in Russia, but it is not the dominant one.
Whether it will become so depends on what the traditionalists do and how the
authorities and force structures use the carrots and sticks available to them.

“The future,” he concludes, will
involve “’hybrid Islam’ in which will be combined its traditional and
non-traditional interpretations, and the divide between them will become as is already
happening ever more conditional,” something that both religious and secular
leaders are going to have to cope with.

After discussing the conflicts among
the Muslim Spiritual Directorates (MSDs), which have heated up in recent
months, and the emerging role of Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov as an all-Russian
Muslim politician, the Moscow expert draws one final and more unsettling
conclusion.

Malashenko argues that the current
economic crisis in Russia is going to have an impact on Russia’s Muslims just
as it is having on other Russians as well. “As is well known,” he writes, “in
the Muslim milieu, protest attitudes in part are expressed via religion. From
this it follows, that the crisis is creating favorable ground for the growth of
Islamic radicalism.”

That trend, he says, is something which
both the Russian authorities and Russian society must prepare themselves for.